Into the Valley (15 page)

28.

At a gas station she bought a coffee and a doughnut to keep herself alert. She fingered her bra strap. There were too many bills to fit them all in there now: she had stuffed the rest into the ostrich-skin purse and back under the seat of the Mustang, as if surrounding herself with a protective force field.
The gas station attend
ant eyed her as she n
ibbled the icing. She touched her hair; the bab
y powder had stopped absorbing the grease. She move
d casually away from the door
.

She walked behind the station. The mountains were no longer even visible in the brown haze, the valley an endless plain. At her feet everywhere were the wild poppies. Her brain pressed out against her skull, against the backs of her eye sockets. The neon-orange clusters in the dead dry grass pulsed at her. She chucked the coffee and doughnut and followed railroad tracks. The buzzing of the electrical wires like the whir in her head, the trash transmuting itself into diamonds and roses. She yanked a clutch of poppies. Like yanking out the incongruities, the inexplicable. She walked, mashing and dropping the petals, trying to see how she had got here, what to do next.

It had not seemed, as it now did, inevitable: She had risen that day like any other, slipped on the ivory sheath and pinned her hair. She had chosen the bone-colored heels to match the sheath and not taken a sweater for the fog because she was tired of wearing sweaters in July. She had picked up a newspaper to read before and after the bus (because of the motion sickness) and she had made it all as it usually was, even after the girl at the bus stop had made her vomit, even after her mother had called her a lesbian. She read the newspaper but inside was a picture of a burning city in the East. The picture not of the police with shields or the people carrying off televisions, but of a group of black women at a police station. Bags under their eyes, deadened gazes, curlers in their hair, waiting. B. stood in the wet morning air, shivering without a sweater, riveted. She tried to scan other headlines: landslides in Japan and the stock market down. But the black women waiting remained. They were some kind of portent, a communiqué to her alone. The wave of nausea nearly buckled her. She dropped the newspaper in the trash and staggered onto the bus when it came. She gripped her seat. She knew she would not vomit again; she would not get off so easily. Across from her a Chinese woman with the short mannish hair, a suited man reading his paper. She grasped in her mind for a soothing memory, her mother demonstrating the proper method of folding a dress shirt. Collar down, shoulders indented, buttons pressed. B. moved her hands quietly in this rhythm, collar down, shoulders indented, buttons pressed. But the suited man,
whom she'd seen day in
and day out, with h
is paper cup of coffee a
nd shiny gold band, sm
all, balding, who neve
r looked up from his pa
per, struck her, and
she put it together: it was this or
some other man's dre
ss shirt she was fold
ing in her mind. The bus rattled under electric wires. The weekend to come again, the hours to be counted, and the only thing to be done to fold the suited man's dress shirt in one's mind. (While he went off to work with his coffee and paper, day after day, as if nothing was wrong, as if B. were not ill and the black women not waiting and the young women not loose-clothed and long-haired at bus stops.) At her stop, B. stumbled off and into her office building and at her desk she turned on the typewriter and typed the first letter in her basket without removing her purse from her wrist, and then another, and then another. The spinning on and on.

Without thinking, she reached in her purse for one of the counterfeit checks she'd not yet dared touch. And like the detonating of a bomb the thoughts
stopped
.

She left her desk with the typewriter still humming. The bank a block away the oldest in the West, a plaque certified, and the brass fixtures shone and the glass panes lined up perfectly across the marble. There was nothing to focus on but the gleam and the panes and the softness of the teller's hair, and there was no going back.

Out of her palm fell the crushed poppies. A train whistle blew in the near distance. She left the railroad tracks and walked back to the Mustang and understood exactly where to go next.

29.

An ocherous afternoon light fell on the subdivision. B. drove past the gate, the colored flags flat in the dead air. The stucco houses looked blanched in the heat, which seemed to radiate up from the ground and in from fields and to bend the new trees along the street to nowhere. She parked the car and walked into the cul-de-sac. Her brain continuing to press against her skull. A toddler on a tricycle in a faded bathing suit stared blankly at her.

B. passed the unfinished houses
with giant still-empty rooms and followed the walkway of the first occupied unit. She glanced around. The toddler continued to stare. B. flipped quickly through the letters, slipping anything official-looking into the ostrich-skin purse. She did this at three more houses. As she walked back to her car, the throbbing and swirling and heat and caffeine came together in a steady blaring in her mind.

A man came out of one of the houses. “Are you looking for Patty? Because she's sick today.” B. walked on without answering, past the little girl, fumbling with the car keys. The man followed her.

“I can have her call you! She'll hate to have missed—”

B. slammed the door of the Mustang and peeled out.

In a motel room with the drapes closed she opened the envelopes. She did not look at the amounts, just wrote down names and account numbers on a torn-out page of the phone book.

She dialed him. His face coalesced in her mind only in the vaguest form, black and pink dabs on a canvas.

He did not pick up. She lay her head on the bedspread, the heavy receiver at her ear. She dialed again and again. In the clicks and the tumbling she felt the carsickness drumming her down into a dark echoing pit.

When he finally answered, she said: “I'll tell you the truth this time.”

Her mind focused on the single guiding image of the banks. “It's some trouble I got into back east. A loan I took out under the table.”

There was silence on the line, the lighting of a cigarette. “Go on,” he said.

She waited for the signal of the image in her mind. “It was an operation. I've never told anyone. I was pregnant, by one of the college boys. He proposed. But he hit me.” She told him she'd gotten a backroom abortion but something had gone wrong; she'd had terrible pains. When she finally went to her doctor, he advised a hysterectomy.

It was a true story. She'd heard one of the secretaries tell it about a friend, except instead of having the operation the friend had hung herself by a belt in her closet.

She thought for a moment she'd lost him.

“So you couldn't tell your mama and papa who sent you to the nice little college to marry a nice little college boy,” he said. But she heard in his voice the beginning of a desire to believe her.

“No.”

“You already lied to me once.”

“I'm not lying.”

She waited to hear cigarette paper crumpling, an exhale. She heard nothing.

Finally, he spoke. “I'm sorry that happened to you. It's not right something like that should happen to you.”

“Will you help me then?”

She felt his vulnerability beating through the line. “What's in it for me?” he asked.

“I'll be your girl, Daughtry.”

She considered briefly how she was deceiving him. But the dark sinking pulled her down and she knew there was only one thing she cared about.

30.

He was waiting for her
in the lobby of a new Motel 6 off the freeway. As he walked through the glass doors she saw that he was unshaven, his thick black eyebrows unruly as if he had tossed and turned and left straight from bed. He told her to walk toward the Mustang with him and they sat in the front seats without looking at each other.

“I have new account numbers,” B. blurted out.

“What are you talking about?”

“I took them from a subdivision.”

He put his forehead in his hands. “You kidding me? Are
you asking to get caught? It's not as big as you think out here. You
have to let me take care of that.”

“I wanted to be prepared. So it would go more quickly.”

“How did you know I'd help you, huh? You think I'm a sucker?” She tried not to hear the plaintiveness in his voice.

“Of course not,” she stalled. “I was just hoping. I was hoping you'd see me again. I wanted it to help us.”

“Forget the damn account numbers.”

A brown-skinned maid rolled her cart in front of the car. In a torturous slowness, she pulled out one at a time a roll of toilet paper, a set of sheets, soap. B. tried to wait but could not. “Do you have the new ones?”

He kneaded the eyebrows. “I could leave right now. Sob story and all.”

“Will it take very long, Daughtry?”

“I could, you know. Get back in the car and drive all the damn way back and forget I ever met you.”

“Please help me, Harold.”

He turned toward the door and rubbed his knuckles across his cheek. He looked all of a sudden small and thin.

“We'll have them in a day,” he said coldly. “My buddy'll deliver them here. He wants a cut.”

“We could go meet him,” she said.

He laughed angrily. “Ha! You ain't the one making the deals.” He reached across her and opened the passenger door. “C'mon.”

He led her to his own car in the parking lot. It was a battered coupe, the black interior faded to gray, a piece of ceiling hanging, gouges in the seats. It smelled of cigarettes and aftershave. She did not like leaving the Mustang, but she knew she must follow him. When she'd woken up that morning, her muscles had been taut with dizziness, her fingers clenched around the bedspread, numb.

He drove out behind the motel, toward a collection of cottonwood trees in a vacant field. Their appearance in the middle of the empty lot gave them the aspect of a solemn gathering, a mournful tête-à-tête. “I saw this spot driving in,” he said. “We can relax a little, be normal for once. It'll be good for you. You don't look right.” From the trunk of the coupe he grabbed a bag of sandwiches and six-pack of beer and she noted with passing guilt that he had made a picnic for her.

The creek under the cottonwoods was a bed of dry rocks. He laid out his black leather blazer for her to sit on and spread out the sandwiches. His oiled hair was a dark dome over his pale face, his features pale and tired and slicked with sweat from the heat. B. drank some of the beer but did not feel like touching the sandwich in the hot shade. She wanted to get the picnic over with, act through whatever Daughtry needed her to act through, get on to the checks. But Daughtry smoked a cigarette and drank his beer in sullen silence, as if mulling over a lost argument. The beer and the heat brought her back to her girlhood, her father with his bottle in the backyard after pruning and watering the roses (he loved to tend the rosebushes, never her mother). He spoke to B. in the simplest of terms—what she was playing, where she and her mother had bought her dress—and she did not know why she missed these stunted exchanges, why they seemed now reassuringly delineated.

She knew she should try to tell Daughtry about missing the delineation, to offer some kind of truth. “I suppose when I was a girl,” she began hesitatingly, “I had the same idea about growing up as everyone else. Marriage, children. Then in college I didn't want to think about it. I only wanted to be on my own for a while, have my own apartment and job, nothing seemed so urgent
. . .
Then people started making less sense. They always asked me the same things. They started to feel very different from me, from what I thought about, and I began
. . .
to feel funny. I had this dizziness, you see, this nausea or wooziness or I don't know how to describe it. So I tried to feel better from what's supposed to make a girl feel better: meeting men, seeing pretty flowers, having my hair done. But none of it worked. And now the dizziness is there all the time. It never stops.” She gasped for air, it seemed. “Sometimes I don't see how to live.”

Daughtry took a long pull on his beer and then tossed the empty can toward the dry creek. “Tell you the truth, part of me wants to hit you. I've never hit a girl and I never will, but part of me wants to slap some sense into you so bad I could taste it.

“You got no idea what it's like, with your school and your books and your fanciness. It's not like I don't have dreams too, you know. I'm a
custodian,
for Chrissakes
. . .
I want to get a little fishing boat. My days off sometimes I go down near the wharves and throw in a line, take the catch back to Chinatown and sell 'em right outta the bucket. Gone in minutes, those Chinamen
know their fish. But it makes me feel good. I got my own spot picked out and it don't matter if it's foggy and the tourists are shaking in their windbreakers, I'm out there and I don't have to think about the damned union or time card or parole. Just the smell of the ocean and the fog mixed in the air, like a perfume
. . .
I can smell it here in this dry hole. Now if I had a boat, that's all I'd do.

“I'm sorry you're dizzy,” he said. “But you've never had to worry about money in your life. I knew that the first day I saw you. You could do anything.”

“Have you ever been on a boat, Daughtry?”

He dug at the dry grass with his boot heel. “Naw. But I seen 'em doing it. I could do it if I had the chance.”

He looked up into the cottonwoods. He seemed to be reading the flickering leaves for some go-ahead.

“I thought about it the whole drive out here. What I think we should do. That would really set us up, fix us both. By the time we're done we'll have enough to get to Mexico, and I think we should get married down there.” He paused here but still did not look down from the trees. “You told me yourself the college guy hurt you, and so that kind of guy isn't the answer for you. You need someone like me. You're too soft for things, is what I've figured out. Too thin-skinned. I'm the kind of guy who can look out for you.” His voice gathered strength as he spoke. “So after this run, we won't have to do anything else. I can get a boat down there and take care of us. You're different and I'm different and maybe we fit together.”

He paused and there was a hot breeze rustling the cottonwood leaves, then silence.

“You can say right now if you don't want to marry me and I'll leave you alone.” He looked at her now. “I'll leave you alone, but you'll be on your own getting the money. That's my offer to you.”

She had watched his mouth moving, his tobacco-stained teeth and his pointed tongue flashing periodically over his dry lips. The words “marriage” and “Mexico” floated over her. She understood in them only her hands at the counters again, sliding the checks forward and collecting back the crisp bills, returning to the delineations, the cool expansive feeling. She would tell him whatever he needed to hear.

“I can't cook,” she answered finally.

A crooked smile bloomed in his face. “I'll handle it, baby. I'll do the fishing and the cooking and you just stay pretty and get a tan.” He grabbed her and pressed her head into the damp of his chest, lips to her dirty hair. “It'll be the best living. You'll see.”

She waited in the odor of his undershirt and their sweat for him to release her. The dappling of light through the cottonwoods made parts of them golden, his bicep, her white wrist, and in this light his proposal and her acceptance of it were remote and enchanted, a story she could listen to and admire.

Back at the motel, he threw an envelope onto the bed. The blonde woman in the new driver's license had not dissimilar features—an oval face, the aquiline nose. But the woman's eyes were younger, fresh and open. B. memorized the freshness before putting the ID into the ostrich-skin purse, as if she could inhabit that too.

Daughtry made love to her in the motel bed. He did not comment on her rankness, the rat's nest French twist; it seemed to make him that much more devouring. She tried to lose herself in the sensations of skin on skin, the friction and release. But in reality she was walking across the linoleum, taking up the chained ballpoint pen, watching the clock above the vault. He fell asleep afterward, his hot thick body clamped over hers, but she went on, tracing the lines of the teller windows, running her fingers along the velvet ropes.